We have always been pretty up-front with DS about what is going on. Especially when a kid already knows they are different, it seems fair to validate it. I think we can make better choices in life if we have a sense of where we fit and that there are other kids like us out there, even if they are not in our classes. But you also have to let them know that just being smart doesn't get you very far in this world--it's what you do with it that matters.
We had started DS in music lessons when he was 5 and he saw there were kids for whom the music came much more easily than for him. We used that to explain that different kids were good at different things. He had self-taught reading at 2 so he had never had to struggle with reading like the other kids in his class were doing. But he had had to struggle with the right way to hold his violin etc. I told him that for many kids learning to read was like learning the bow-hold. We never had any problems with his thinking he was better than the other kids or coasting. I think a lot of that was because we had introduced something that was hard for him early on. He has a lot of empathy for the other kids because of that and he also knows that not everything will come easy.
